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Chapter 1
“Jeeves?” Tinsley asked as she surveyed the A62 Nebula transporter ship she’d basically called home for the last four years.
Her voice echoed through the ship’s shining metal interior. She was all alone for now—at least when it came to living, breathing, sentient beings. Her crew had been on leave for a couple of days as they docked in the bustling Nebu space station in between jobs, but that didn’t mean Tinsley was resting. In fact, her work had just begun.
“Yes, Miss Adams?” the English-accented voice from her AI system, the only company she had for the time being, replied.
She grinned. Jeeves. The joke would never get old.
“Can you run another diagnostic check on the ship?” she asked, even though she’d already run one the day before. “I just want to make sure everything’s ready for tomorrow.”
If a disembodied AI could grin wryly, she was sure Jeeves was doing that now.
“Why certainly,” he replied with a hint of obsequiousness in his voice. “Running diagnostics.”
Tinsley rolled her eyes, but it was done good-naturedly. She’d programmed the AI herself, after all, as a little nod to her home planet of Earth. She rarely got to see her home planet now that she was the captain of her own ship.
Still, she wouldn’t have it any other way. She looked around. Every surface gleamed, and everything was ready for the job that would start the next day. The jobs she took on as captain weren’t anything especially exciting in the grand scheme of things—just delivering some mail from Nebu to the planet of Xoyosis on the other side of the Delta Gamo system.
But it beat serving drinks in some dive bar back on Earth, or worse, ferrying tourists around her home city of New Delhi. No, she liked life this way, and she took pride in her work, which was why she was there on the transporter instead of enjoying some downtime on the space station with the rest of her crew.
“The diagnostics report is ready,” Jeeves’s voice resounded over the ship’s speakers. “Everything appears to be in order. Both thrusters are at full capacity, the fuel tank is full, and the hyperdrive is in perfect working order. Just as it was yesterday.”
Tinsley chuckled. “Thanks, Jeeves.”
“Will there be anything else?” Tinsley thought she heard a hint of cheek in Jeeves’s voice.
She looked around the ship—everything in order, rations fully stocked, and every surface perfectly clean. She couldn’t prepare any more than she already had, and she figured it was finally time to relax a little.
“No, that’s all, thanks.” She spoke and then made her way to the captain’s quarters for some shut-eye before the crew returned.
She knew she needed a good night’s rest, and soon she was sleeping soundly.
From this sound sleep, she was suddenly awakened by the hum of the ship’s engines.
At first, Tinsley thought she must be dreaming, but she quickly realized she’d know the sound of her ship anywhere. She placed a hand on the wall beside her bed, and sure enough, it vibrated ever so slightly.
“What the hell…” she muttered to herself, turning on the lights in her bunk and pulling on the clothes she’d worn the day before.
“If this is Salo’s idea of a joke…” she continued under her breath, wondering if her first mate would ever do such a thing, but the idea was absurd. Salo was one of the most professional crew members she’d ever worked with. She would never undermine her crewmate. And besides, they were all station-side at Nebu.
Tinsley was still a little groggy from sleep, though she was perking up rapidly given the circumstances. Still, she was baffled by what was happening, and though she tried to sift through possible reasons for why the ship might suddenly be firing up its engines, she was drawing a blank.
Could there be a malfunction with the ship? she wondered, but the two diagnostic tests quickly quashed that idea. No way could anything have gone wrong since the night before. If it had, Jeeves would have picked it up and warned her immediately, as he was programmed to do.
Suddenly she heard a strange voice coming from the direction of the bridge. It was too far away to tell who it was or even what they were saying, especially over the hum of the engines, but Tinsley got the distinct feeling it wasn’t anyone she knew.
As she pulled on her shoes, another thought suddenly occurred to her.
Could they be pirates?
That was pretty unlikely, given that they’d been docked in a bustling space station. Any pirate crew would have been spotted a mile away and never even let into the station, let alone waltz onto a transporter in one of the hangars. But stranger things had happened, she supposed.
When she was finally dressed, she rushed out of her room and into the hallway that joined the captain’s quarters to the bridge. At first, she peeked through the porthole that led onto the bridge, and as she did, she saw something truly incredible. The ship—her ship—was inexplicably overrun by Lorr males.
Her crew of humans, Noxxans, and Zaroans were nowhere to be seen, still attending to their affairs on the station. Instead, every being she saw boasted violet skin crisscrossed with bold black or white patterns. They each had a pair of curled black ram’s horns that protruded from their heads. And they were all at least six feet tall.
They didn’t look like pirates, though. In fact, they were all dressed in what looked like military uniforms, though her knowledge of Lorr customs was hazy.
